Application traffic management devices, and a variety of other network devices, are often deployed, physically and/or logically, at the edges of enterprise networks to control bandwidth utilization, for example, across an access link to a wide area network (WAN), to filter network traffic for security related purposes, to optimize or accelerate network traffic, and the like. Such network devices typically include one or more inside or LAN ports, and one or more outside or WAN ports. When the traffic management device is situated at that single gateway between one and other networks, it will logically be able to process all inbound and outbound traffic. As a result, the device can effectively classify flows and maintain rate control policies on specific partitions.
However, application traffic management devices can sometimes become non-functional due to hardware or software failures. Typically, a bypass switch is utilized to physically shunt network traffic away from a packet processing section of the non-functioning application traffic management device in order to maintain network connectivity. For example, upon the failure of a network device, a short circuit is created between the inside or LAN port and the outside or WAN port to allow signals carrying network traffic to bypass the processing path of the network device. Such functionality is sometimes referred to as “fail-to-wire.” U.S. Pat. No. 6,327,242, for example, discloses one possible fail-to-wire implementation.